Musings on my family, work and things I find interesting. Mainly, this was / is intended to record things for my kids so that they can get an insight into how I feel about them, plus I haven't done any writing for a long time, so would like to get some skill in that sphere again.

Monday, October 05, 2009

At work, I've been using git-svn for quite a while. I like the workflow options, and better merging capabilities. As a casualty from the recent laptop hard drive failure, all of my git repositories had gone, checked out from our main SVN server. I'm the only one using git where I work, but I love the workflow that it gives me and going back to SVN is a no-no. That had previously been created by doing a

git svn clone -s svn://svn.example.com/module

That took ages (3 days for all of the stuff I need to work on) and was quite slow when doing commits. My backups are mildly corrupt too, so I've started over, and set it up properly this time. Thanks to the guide here.

On the server, I created a directory to hold the git mirrors, and a text file containing the SVN modules that I wanted initially. Then a simple bash script to loop through the file and create a mirror of each SVN module:

for f in `cat svn-modules.txt` ; do svn2git.sh $f ; done

Then just make the repositories available:

git-daemon --export-all --base-path=/opt/git --verbose

and create a cron job to refresh the git mirrors periodically.

git --bare svn fetch --all

There are other ways, but that's the quick-n-dirty approach. Then a similar script on the client, which used the same list of modules that I wanted to check out.

Benefits of this approach:

Much faster to set up - it took just over a couple of hours this time.

Available to other people to try out - not just me.

Provides a migration path off SVN as we eventually migrate off SVN (my long-term aim, muhahaha)